About this exhibition

Rita McBride works with the language of sculpture, employing the vocabularies of architecture and design. Her cross-disciplinary practice also encompasses collaborative publications, editions, performances and large-scale works in public space. Following in the line of surveys at WIELS by mid-career artists, this exhibition – titled Explorer – features new productions and existing works, including several pieces never before shown in Europe. Attuned as she is to space and context, with her signature humour McBride has developed an exhibition that responds to the particular qualities of the WIELS building and its exhibition architecture. She is fondly critical of Modernist architecture and the utopian project of Modernism. As one critic put it, McBride’s work is a “light-handed and witty critique of the pleasures and vagaries of Modernism’s nervous breakdown.”

Spanning all three floors of WIELS’ exhibition spaces, McBride presents a new work titled Guide Rails (2017). The installation, 200 metres of freestanding white wooden structures, quotes original guide rails found in the Santa Monica mountains that once led to the private ranch of the humourist and celebrated cowboy, Will Rogers. The length of McBrides’ Guide Rails replicates that of the white walls of Richard Venlet’s exhibition architecture, commissioned by WIELS for its 10th anniversary exhibition, The Absent Museum. These newly created temporary delineations for WIELS highlight the lively and co-dependent relationships between architects, artists, cultural institutions and the politics of real estate. The Guide Rails will host more than 20 artist interventions, described as Something Stronger Than Me*.

In dialogue with this new installation, the exhibition presents a selection of McBride’s pieces that reveal how sculpture and architecture inform and measure one another. These works reintroduce forms that are often overlooked in our built environment: air conditioning units, pipes, skylights, telecommunications boxes. McBride transforms their typical materials or shifts their scale to explore the tensions between functionalism and formalism. The earliest date from 1992, the most recent from 2017, revealing the consistency of her approach and vision. They include her Glass Conduits (1999-2004), White Elephants (1999-2015), Managers and Minimanagers (2003-2004), and Vents (2010), among others.

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14.09.2017

Opening of the exhibition Explorer by Rita McBride. The opening also marks the beginning of Something Stronger Than Me* with the first activity by the artist collective Extension.
14.09.2017,...
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15.09.2017 – 07.01.2018

Extension is an artist group based in Düsseldorf, Germany. It was formed by Micky Damm, Rita McBride and Christian Odzuck. Extension began with obtaining an enormous quantity of aluminium tiles from...
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15.09 – 10.12.2017

The paintings of Jannis Schroeder (b.1989, Germany) in Something Stronger Than Me* were all made in 2017, during his (ongoing) year-long residency at WIELS. They place a particular emphasis on...
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19.09 – 02.10.2017

Axelle Stiefel is a Swiss artist born in 1988. Her work is cinematic and performative. The exhibition conceived as a display is the basis of her modus operandi. She was a resident at WIELS in...
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24.09.2017

Conversation with the artists Valérie Mannaerts and Koenraad Dedobbeleer around Rita McBride’s works
Valérie Mannaerts (b. 1974 in Brussels) and Koenraad Dedobbeleer (b. 1975 in Halle) live in...
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04.10 – 22.10.2017

Since 2003, Lucia Nimcova has been documenting the changing societies of Central and Eastern Europe through the mundane, everyday stories of middle and working-class women’s lives. She uses simple...
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04.10.2017 – 07.01.2018

For Suse Weber, a sculpture’s origin lies in the manifestation of a symbol of power. The monument, the pedestal (or – as in some of Weber’s own installations – the rows of seats) stipulate...
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04.10.2017 – 07.01.2018

lonelyfingers is an online platform created in 2012 by visual artists Diango Hernández and Anne Pöhlmann. Their interest focuses on the objects and documents that accompany and inspire artists...
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13.10 – 15.10.2017

Fake Calligraphy is Manoeuvre, Maartje Fliervoet, Ada Van Hoorebeke, as well as participants. Manoeuvre is a collective for artistic co-creation.
Fake Calligraphy is a sculpture inspired by the...
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24.10 – 12.11.2017

Lázara Rosell Albear (b. 1971, Cuba) is a Brussels-based artist with a mixed practice, ranging from the research of sound and performance to the production of events and films. Exchange and sharing...
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24.10.2017 – 07.01.2018

For Something Stronger Than Me* Melissa Gordon proposes two separate pieces: one which inserts itself into the architecture of the show and another that is a collaborative space for everyone to...
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25.10 – 27.10.2017

On the occasion of Something Stronger Than Me*, Melissa Gordon and Eva Kenny invite you to the Female Genius Night Club, a three-day residency in the WIELS Project Room.
Female Genius Night Club is...
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31.10.2017 – 07.01.2018

SPARTA was founded by David Mackaay in 2014 at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is run by students. It is a social place to meet, to discuss and reflect: a room where food was served, parties held, with...
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05.11.2017

Discover Rita McBride’s exhibition with your children during an interactive visit.
05.11.2017, 13:00 and 15:00 Free with entrance ticket of the exhibition – without reservationIn French and...
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07.11.2017 – 07.01.2018

Tonio Kröner’s paintings, sculptures and installations evoke surrealist qualities: shifts in scale, from the realistic to the abstract or exaggerated, wild in combinations of the disparate. By...
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11.11.2017

Throughout history, traditional music and culture have been appropriated and misrepresented. Presently in Ukraine, patriotic songs play an important role in fuelling a populist, romantic nationalism....
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14.11.2017 – 07.01.2018

NUANS is an artist’s initiative by Anna Heidenhain, Elmar Hermann and Hugo Schneider, which always involves new collaborations in different places. NUANS has no fixed address and stays constantly...
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16.11 – 18.11.2017

Fake Calligraphy is Manoeuvre, Maartje Fliervoet, Ada Van Hoorebeke, as well as participants. Manoeuvre is a collective for artistic co-creation.
Fake Calligraphy is a sculpture inspired by the...
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21.11.2017 – 07.01.2018

Monika Stricker is a German artist based in Brussels. A former student of Rita McBride at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, she was in residency at WIELS in 2013. Stricker is interested in the social...
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21.11.2017 – 07.01.2018

« Nine slim aluminium signs, black printed ink held within a gloss coated surface finish, offset from the wall by a slim metal fixing structure. The line of slightly over-small signs is hung low,...
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03.12.2017

Discover Rita McBride’s exhibition with your children during an interactive visit
03.12.2017, 13:00 and 15:00 Free with entrance ticket of the exhibition – without reservation
Please arrive 15...
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06.12.2017

On Wednesday 6 December, at the occasion of the regular late night opening of the first Wednesday of the month, WIELS organizes a Special Nocturne with new contributions of Something Stronger Than...
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14.12 – 16.12.2017

Fake Calligraphy is Manoeuvre, Maartje Fliervoet, Ada Van Hoorebeke, as well as participants. Manoeuvre is a collective for artistic co-creation.
Fake Calligraphy is a sculpture inspired by the...
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Linked event

07.01.2018

Discover Rita McBride’s exhibition with your children during an interactive visit
07.01.2018, 13:00 and 15:00 Free with entrance ticket of the exhibition – without reservation
Please arrive 15...
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Linked event

07.01.2018

Don't miss this final occasion to visit the exhibitions of Rita McBride and Something Stronger Than Me*. Join us during the several and diverse activities during this day! Programme: 11:00 - 20:00:...
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Bookshop

This succinct and elegant book acts as a souvenir to the exhibition of Rita McBride’s work, titled Explorer, which took place at WIELS in the autumn of 2017. Illustrated with exhibition views of...
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